Aliens: A Positive Experience
by Deborah Warren

The Vancouver Sun
British Columbia, Canada
January 22, 2000

What do people really want when they think about UFOs?
     According to John Mack's newest book Passport to the Cosmos, the first thing they want is for their experiences to stop. Only after they realize they have no power to stop the experience do they begin to accept a process that is informative and transformative—a process that propels them out of their narcissistic concerns and towards active involvement with environmental values, the survival of humanity and an exploration of spiritually-based consciousness. The Harvard psychiatrist also includes three other perspectives of contact with the “Star People.” These perspectives include those of a Native-American healer, a South African shaman, and an indiginous anthropologist from South America. The same themes continue to resonate through all perspectives.
     It seems that John Mack may be treading on Ken Wilber's turf (Blend, Jan. 15). For his part, John Mack has a few comments to make about the doubtful, referring to them variously as the skeptical elite and uninformed debunkers. Furthermore, Mack states that these people are “usually misnamed skeptics...who speak from an ideological bias, putting their viewpoints forth as a scientific perspective.” Perhaps Wilber, the philosopher, should think about turning off the television and picking up a book. He might discover he has more in common with Mack than he realizes.

© 2000 The Vancouver Sun

UTNE Reader | Letters to the Editor
by an experiencer from Passport to the Cosmos
March/April 2000

I consider Wilber to be one of the great thinkers of our generation. However, in spite of the fact that he continues to produce a fine synthesis of the spiritual and the scientific, I find myself once again disappointed by the condescending stance he has taken on the subject of “alien abduction.” As it happens, I know a couple of the people who were with John Mack on the talk show mentioned, and know many other people who have had these kinds of experiences as well.
     Contrary to his observation of them as “hicks” (through endorsing the Dennis Miller comment), they are compassionate people of depth, typically possessing a keen intelligence. Some of them are notably articulate. They weren't then and aren't now looking for attention. All of them are acutely aware of how outrageously unbelievable it sounds to report interactions with “hybrids.” Their egos didn't need some cosmic alien pacifier to help them feel better about their “insignificance” in the Great Big Universe. They have children. They have husbands and wives and careers. Often, their relationships to the aforementioned are jeopardized due to the stress of the highly unusual nature of a contact experience and the misunderstanding and prejudiced attitude that surrounds the phenomenon.
     Certainly this experience has entered into our lives, our realities, in ways that we literally never could have imagined. But that doesn't mean that it hasn't “happened.” And no, we haven't figured out how to reproduce it in a laboratory. In this respect, it is anecdotal. But even that doesn't mean that it hasn't happened. Yes, our culture says that this is impossible, and, no, we don't have any proof of anything. And still, those things don't negate the “reality” of what happened either. Indeed, as physicist Stanton Friedman so often likes to quote, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
     Perhaps whether or not it has happened in a purely nuts and bolts sense shouldn't be the main question here. Instead, maybe the central questions should be: why is it that human beings have such a hard time leaving something in the category of “unknown”? Why haven't we learned patience? Why haven't we learned not to judge? Or why have we not learned how to simply be silent and humble in the face of uncertainty?
     I respect the work of Ken Wilber. Of Grace and Grit touched me as few books have. And yet, I would never presume that in reading about Treya, her battles, victories, and Wilber's responses to them, that I would know enough of who she was or who Ken is, to judge the value or reality of their experience together. I would never presume that I could have known what it felt like to walk a day in their shoes. I don't know cancer. I don't know what it felt like to love her as much as he did. Only Ken Wilber experienced and, therefore, knows his love for her. And just because no one else could see that, feel that, touch that, taste that or smell that, doesn't mean that that love did not exist. And for as much as anyone who knew them as a couple could “see” or “feel” their love for each other, those who know me as someone who has had these experiences can“see” and “feel” that “something” incredible has happened in my life. At the very least, that much is palpable.
     It is my hope that Wilber might some day ease his tone on this topic and simply allow for there to be expressed in his views an appreciation for “that which is unknown and currently not understood.” In so doing, this would help to relieve at least some of the pressure that I and others like me withstand from our cultural elite as we seemingly in defiance tentatively give ourselves permission to validate the truths of our own experiences. In our continuing to explore what lies beyond the boundaries of what we have until now believed “reality” to be, I for one, look forward to learning as much as I can about what it means to be Alive in a Universe so vast that I literally cannot fathom it.
     Life is short. Love is Infinite. Perhaps we would all do well to remember that when we speak critically of one another. Now, (and this is said with a smile) if you'll excuse me, I have to go and pull a flashlight out of my ass and then try to figure out what could have possibly gone wrong in fulcrum 2 of my life...